Waiting for taxis and badges and sound at NATO summit

BUCHAREST (Reuters) - No taxis, no badges, no sound -- welcome to Romania, host of the 2008 NATO summit.

Journalists arriving for a conference of the 26-nation defense alliance in this recently joined ex-communist nation got their first shock at Otopeni Airport on Tuesday when they found there were no cabs to take them into the centre of Bucharest.

Reporters were invited to take an official shuttle bus and told it would be allowed to use the cleared VIP lanes on the highway into the city. It was not.

After crawling through traffic jams for 90 minutes, some journalists were barred from entering the summit press centre because crashed computers could not print accreditation badges.

Others were told their applications were still being checked by security.

"Come back in two hours," a Reuters reporter was told. Some journalists were still without a badge on Wednesday, a day after their arrival, and were denied entry to the summit.

Once inside the cavernous 3,000-room Parliament Palace, built as the "House of the People" by late Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, journalists discovered a new snag.

U.S. President George W. Bush's lips moved silently as he delivered a keynote speech at a venue elsewhere in town. The audio link was not working and headphones had not arrived.

Bush's voice suddenly resounded through the marble halls two-thirds of the way through his speech as the connection was established.

The headphones arrived an hour after he had finished, but the promised audio feed from a conference where ministers and opinion leaders from both sides of the Atlantic were debating the summit issues did not materialize.

Instead, journalists were treated to live images of VIPs' cars standing idly on the airport runway.

(Reporting by Paul Taylor and Mark John, editing by Timothy Heritage)